Is Shopify Bad for SEO? The Truth About Shopify SEO

But how effective is it at search engine optimisation (SEO)? Shopify’s built with store owners in mind, so ease of use is prioritised over SEO or organic search visibility. For example, it handles many SEO tasks automatically for you.

Here, you’ll discover more about Shopify SEO; its benefits and limitations. This guide’s designed to help you make an informed choice about Shopify for your ecommerce platform.

What does Shopify do well for SEO?

Shopify’s a popular choice for both established and new ecommerce business owners. You get a fast, hosted infrastructure. Shopify looks after core ecommerce SEO tasks automatically, including sitemaps (sitemap.xml), canonical tags, title tags, metadata, redirects and basic structured data schema markup. Its features like global CDN, lazy loading and automatic image optimisation are incredibly beneficial. That all comes as standard, out of the box. You don’t need an additional plugin or even a developer to set that up.

From the outset, Shopify saves you time and effort with its built-in SEO features. It’s a robust, and reliable platform for your ecommerce brand.

Find out more on what’s included in standard Shopify SEO.

Does Shopify have limitations that affect SEO performance?

There are huge positives that come with Shopify’s ecommerce SEO, but there are a few constraints too. Here, we’ll outline the five biggest limitations. Whilst most of these limitations aren’t direct ranking factors themselves, they affect things that are (technical SEO factors like indexing and site speed, or click through rates and bounce rates for example).

1. Rigid URL structure

The URL produced by Shopify is set. Shopify includes the section or category into every URL. For example, a product page will always have /products/ in its URL. The same goes for blogs or collection pages. You can’t remove or restructure these prefixes, even if you ask a developer.

Instead, focus your optimisation effort on writing clean, descriptive slugs. That’s the part you can customise and where to include target keywords or branding.

2. Product URLs

Have you ever noticed how you can see the same products on different URLs on Shopify? Out of the box, products get listed in multiple collections and that generates new URL paths for the same product variant. Shopify’s solution is to add canonical tags to avoid duplicate content but that is only a soft solution. Your developer can override this functionality so that each product only has one URL.

3. Overuse reliance on canonical tag handling

Shopify manages canonical tags automatically in many situations, but over relies on it. For example, every filter state creates a parametered URL. Every recommended product, product listing, or upsell creates a new parametered URL. This can create thousands of URLs and create spider traps and waste crawl budget. Yes, they have canonicals but you should aim to have a clean crawl. Work with a developer to ensure these URLs aren’t discovered or crawled by search engines.

4. App bloat

Shopify’s a hosted ecommerce platform that’s often praised for its superior Core Web Vitals and security (an SSL certificate is included). It’s known for its decent site speed. But a surefire way to reduce those Core Web Vitals is to install a load of third-party apps. Many app will add JavaScript to your store. That negatively impacts your page speed. And that poor user experience increases your bounce rate and harms your SEO ranking too.

Shopify doesn’t stop you from installing far more apps than your site can handle comfortably. And there are plenty of helpful design, product management, search and SEO apps to choose from. So it’s down to you to conduct regular SEO audits to avoid app bloat.

5. Basic blog functionality

Blogs are an important aspect of content marketing and attracting organic traffic. They’re the ideal place to include the keyword research terms that match your customer’s search intent.

Shopify makes it straightforward to create blog content. Yes, it can be fairly basic and lacks more advanced features like custom post types, category pages or dynamic internal linking out of the box. But you can easily expand on its capabilities with some dev work.

Is Shopify bad for SEO or just misunderstood?

Shopify definitely isn’t bad for SEO. It’s a very reliable, popular and easy-to-use ecommerce platform. Out of the box, you get decent options for your ecommerce platform. You get a fast, hosted infrastructure with core SEO tasks handled automatically. It’s designed to make ecommerce simpler for you.

There are limitations that come with Shopify SEO, but they can be managed and overcome easily. Some fixes you can make yourself, whilst others need developer support. You may find that the out-of-the box version does everything you need. If not, it’s simple enough for a developer to add customisation and more advanced features.

Using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console or AHrefs, you can monitor site performance and the organic search landscape to continually modify and enhance your ecommerce site. SEO isn’t something to set and forget. If you want your site to get picked up in AI search or to top the search engine results pages (SERPS), you need to work on it ongoing.

Want some help with that? Let’s talk about your ecommerce SEO and whether Shopify is your best option.

How does Shopify compare to WooCommerce on WordPress? Take a look at our comparison of the ecommerce platforms.